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Yesterday's release of the 1.0.8 patch for Diablo III fixed many known bugs, but it also added an exploit that let savvy users create in-game gold out of thin air, wreaking havoc on the in-game economy and real-money auction house.

By cancelling a transaction while it was still being processed, players on the 1.0.8 patch would get twice as much gold returned to them, creating an easy source of infinite in-game currency.

Rather than rolling back the servers by a day to erase any sign of the duplicated gold, Blizzard has decided to instead punish the "relatively few players" it says made use of the bug with "fairly limited" effect in the wider game. "We feel that performing a full roll back would impact the community in an even greater way, as it would require significant downtime as well as revert the progress legitimate players have made since patch 1.0.8 was released this morning."

That decision has created a great deal of controversy among some players who say Blizzard's actions will do nothing to fix the flood of duplicated gold that caused the value of legitimate gold to plummet in a very short time yesterday. "People with the infinite source of gold today purchased items non-stop for hours," forum poster Chillaxin noted in a popular thread of the D3 forums. "Quadrillions of gold flooded into the economy and was divided among the entire player-base to anyone selling items. You may have stopped the dupers but there is severe permanent damage if you don't rollback everything."

Le DICE? I feel bad for them, if so. They're success means EA will try to turn them into a workhorse, much like a game title being milked.

Yup, DICE - although we just said Digital Illusions back then. They used to be located here in Gothenburg before EA decided to consolidate them with another office in Stockholm. Apparently they're undoing that merger now. Shows up in my LinkedIn feed all the time.

The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.

No. There is a second shoe waiting to drop here, and I'd love to know what it is. Methinks they may have made a deal with GameStop to get a cut of the action on the resale.

I was listening to a PlayStation-focused podcast yesterday in which one of the hosts kept saying, "There's something about this Microsoft console that we don't know yet, and I just have a feeling that system is going to be a huge deal. I think this might be the end of the PlayStation as we've known it."

Curious detail that I heard about today. Most of you probably don't know the name Dave Cutler, but he's a minor celebrity in OS programming circles. First he was at VAX, building VMS to compete with UNIX, and was then recruited to Microsoft to build the kernel for their new OS - what became Windows NT and every modern Windows from XP onwards. He's one of the few superstar programmers MS has left, and since 2012, he's been working on the next Xbox. This makes me curious. Windows is not exactly in great shape, and the obvious spot for him right now would be to get the ARM port of Windows working right - and they put him on the Xbox, which we know is using an x86 processor and an off the shelf GPU. Either they had big problems and someone sent in the The Wolf, or there is indeed something we don't know yet.

The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.

I was listening to a PlayStation-focused podcast yesterday in which one of the hosts kept saying, "There's something about this Microsoft console that we don't know yet, and I just have a feeling that system is going to be a huge deal. I think this might be the end of the PlayStation as we've known it."

Only 5 days until we find out, I suppose.

What is this, a reverse jinx? If Sony competes on price point this time, I feel confident they will have a permanent lead on world-wide sales by year two at the latest, and possibly the US by the end of the gen

Look at the sales figures for this gen between the two and consider that Sony botched things about as badly as they could and MS had as much momentum as they could (getting a second bounce from Kinect).

The Wii U just had its Dreamcast moment. With Electronic Arts confirming it doesn't have any games in development for the machine, one of the console industry's biggest players has walked away from the system counting its losses.

But EA has pulled out of the Wii U because sales of both hardware and software are dreadful. We're not officially allowed to report sales numbers from Chart Track in the UK but everyone in the publishing business can see them quite clearly. There's no need for pretence. When you can get to number one in the Wii U charts by selling less than 1000 units it's no longer a tragedy, it's an actual farce.

The Wii U has been defeated by the most humbling of challengers - consumer apathy. When the inevitable "Nintendo halts Wii U production" stories hit, the majority of those that bought the original Wii won't even notice. The mainstream bought the Wii because it was a fun novelty, they didn't buy it for a new Zelda game. What's the Wii U's novelty? That it does everything a current-gen console does but a little bit slower and with a Fisher Price tablet attached?

Nintendo can't compete with Microsoft and Sony, that's why they've pulled out of the E3 pissing contest. That's almost a dignified admission of defeat. If Nintendo shows off new Starfox, Zelda, Mario and Blast Corps titles next month in L.A. it's only going to be preaching to the converted. They will be drowned out by the bombast and great swinging balls of their rivals. What will the LA Times, Reuters, the BBC, Tech Crunch, Joystiq, VentureBeat, GamesIndustry International, Gamasutra and the rest of the media be prioritising during E3? Anything that can lift the console business up off its knees and give it an adrenaline shot. That's the real story here, and the Wii U is a boxout of what went wrong.

With Nintendo blocking "Let's Play!"ers from generating revenue from their games, I'm guessing Youtube is getting proactive about protecting what I imagine is one of their biggest if not biggest revenue streams. Given the new gen is upon us, it's a smart move, as publishers will blame everything but themselves on perceived lack of sales.

The great part is that all those lets plays are transformative works.
If some kid can do a lets play of you game and everyone else can get just as much enjoyment as he does by watching the video you've made a bad game.

I can kinda see the issue for single player games, but my opinion would be anyone who would rather watch a play through of Assassin's Creed 3 than actually do it isn't a potential customer. There's the spoilers issue, too, but again, someone who was only interested in ACIII that they'd not buy the game after hearing story spoilers doesn't strike me a strong customer.

As for Minecraft, I have to think Notch knows damn well that he'd be sitting on a lot fewer sales if it weren't for LP videos. I myself bought in thanks to the Yogcast Survival Island series.

Meh, big deal. The battery will probably wear out when the controller does. And lately I've had rechargeable Xbox batteries that seem to like to only be charged by the wall outlet or only be charged by the USB charging cable. Some don't seem to work in the wall charger. Hopefully this will stop that.

$50? I can buy a half a dozen... matter fact I probably have half a dozen.

Threw out my originals I got with my first Xbox, just the other day.

But it does mean the end to quickly swapping out batteries, now that I think of it. You have to swap controllers, and hopefully you got another one charged. You're able to use regular AA batteries now.